In the space of just a decade, the Internet, because it provides access to information, and the ability to publish information, in revolutionary ways, has emerged from relative obscurity to international prominence. Whereas, in general, an internet is a network of networks, the Internet is a global collection of interconnected local, mid-level, and wide-area networks that use the Internet Protocol (IP) as the network layer protocol. Whereas the Internet embraces many local- and wide-area networks, a given local- or wide-area network may or may not form part of the Internet.
As the Internet and its underlying technologies have become increasingly familiar, attention has become focused on Internet security and computer network security in general. With unprecedented access to information has also come unprecedented opportunities to gain unauthorized access to data, change data, destroy data, make unauthorized use of computer resources, interfere with the intended use of computer resources, etc. These opportunities have been exploited time and time again.
Many techniques have been used to detect unwanted data and the various related malicious functionality resulting therefrom. For example, name identification may be used to detect a threat specifically based on a file signature. Further, generic identification may be used to detect a threat based on malicious family characteristics (e.g. identifying a bagle variant, etc.). Still yet, “false,” or “falsing,” refers to the detection of a benign file which is not a threat. Heuristics may be used to detect new threats without name or generic identification. Even still, behavioral heuristics may utilize heuristics which, in turn, use a context of malicious operations to improve detection.
Unfortunately, traditional security solutions are, in large, reactive. For example, file signatures are developed after a threat is perceived. There is thus little technology that can effectively detect and remove new unknown threats without significant risk of incorrectly identifying innocent files, etc.
There is thus a need for overcoming these and/or other problems associated with the prior art.